


Dangerous Dreams

by JulyStorms



Series: Before Colors Broke into Shades [43]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-21
Updated: 2015-07-21
Packaged: 2018-04-10 13:22:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4393517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JulyStorms/pseuds/JulyStorms
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He knew it was a dream.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dangerous Dreams

**Author's Note:**

> Requested by [sweetmalice26](http://sweetmalice26.tumblr.com) on Tumblr with this meme prompt: "You finally found me again."

It was a dream. He knew it was by the ethereal quality to the world around him. Everything was light and weightless, free of toil, free of care. Real life was never able to do that sort of thing. Not with wars and walls and sins.

He wanted it, though: the airiness of it all. Soft pastels were easier than bold primaries. They slipped through the cracks, filled the empty spaces in between, made everything feel whole even though he knew that outside of this false context, nothing would ever be that way again.

Reiner was there, jostling him with his shoulder, laughing. He didn’t look haunted.

Bertholdt could not remember the last time that Reiner had looked that way, like he was just the same as everyone else, like life had something good to offer everyone.

He couldn’t hear what Reiner said but he knew it was good. It made him smile, and Reiner returned it without guile lurking behind his eyes. It was horrible in its sentimentality because it was not real, but Bertholdt knew he would continue to let himself pretend while he still could.

It was safe to pretend here in this place that didn’t exist.

* * *

 

The sky was open but there was also a ceiling above. Unquestionably contradictory but not worth thinking about. It seemed natural to have his childhood roof over his head while still being able to see the sky.

White clouds rested on a faded blue background—the same color as his mother’s favorite apron; the stars were out and bright, numerous, uncountable. It was the beauty of open freedom with the security of familiarity.

Laughter floated over to him from some place he couldn’t see and he knew the sounds and the people making them, music left behind but sorely missed, like the sound of the wind at night or the memory of the tree that let light filter through its leaves into his room at eight o’clock in the morning to stir him from his restless slumber.

It was home, and he missed it—missed the smell of the back garden after a too-heavy rainfall, missed the woodpecker whose incessant tapping had always driven him half mad with annoyance… He even missed the furrow between his mother’s brows when she took to scolding him, one hand wagging too hard and the other twisting wrinkles into the skirt of her apron.

* * *

 

Annie’s hair was unbound. It made her stern features look gentler.

Reiner brought one hand down too hard on Bertholdt’s shoulder but it felt like the gentle vibration of a bow across strings instead of a dead weight. He said something in laughing words, teeth showing in his glee, hair sun-bleached, and then he faded like stardust scattering on the wind. The sound lingered a moment, a warm echo, before it, too, faded away.

“You found me,” Annie said, but her voice was a foggy morning, dew so heavy that even the flower stems bowed beneath the burden. She wore only her bulky shirt. Even here, he thought, she wears her armor.

He couldn’t reply. Maybe his words weren’t worthy of the moment.

Annie tucked herself into the space beside him, sitting close enough that her sleeved arm brushed his.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked after a moment, gaze pointed straight ahead.

“Home,” he confessed, and knew she understood that he could only think of it like this.

Her voice was a pleasant rumble of thunder promising much-needed rain: “I miss it, too.”

It was ridiculous for him to love even this version of her, but he did.

 

**Author's Note:**

> If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.  
> —Marcel Proust


End file.
